Monday, March 09, 2015

Lethal Acts of Force in 2014 - 1. Introduction

Nobody knows how many people police kill each year.

This fact has been repeated this past year so many times by
so many different journalists. Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post wrote an
article following the killing of Michael Brown expressing this fact and how
outrageous it is.[1] Lowery pointed out how the Department of
Justice does not keep comprehensive data on this crucial statistic, instead
leaving it up to each law enforcement agency to choose whether or not to report
incidents to the FBI’s database of justifiable homicides by law enforcement.

FBI director James Comey, the guy who heads the agency
responsible for telling the public how many people get killed by police each
year, even bemoaned this fact in a speech given on February 12, 2015 at
Georgetown University. “Reporting by police departments is voluntary and not
all departments participate. That means we cannot fully track the number of
incidents in which force is used by police, or against police, including non-fatal
encounters, which are not reported at all.”[2]

The thing is, we didn’t used to care. Or notice.

Or I should say, I didn’t notice.

I am a middle class white man living in the suburbs. I have
an engineering job. I tune out local news in part because of the depressing never-ending
stream of local crime news. I felt that this news was always unimportant and
served mostly to drive ratings for local news because of a bloodthirsty public.

If it bleeds, it leads, right?

I mean, I always felt bad when I heard about an officer
involved shooting, but I was never moved beyond that.

Every once in a while I’d hear about an incident that
sounded like pretty extreme, like Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, that homeless guy
in Fullerton. Yes, I thought, police
were probably wrong to use so much force in those cases. But lethal acts of police force are rare and
usually justified. Right?

I first started changing my perspective after I heard about
the James Boyd shooting on March 16th. Specifically, after I saw the video.[3]

I was born and raised in Albuquerque, but I don’t live there
anymore. Watching James Boyd get gunned down in the foothills in which I often
hiked was quite surreal to be honest. I
couldn’t tell if I felt that way though because of the total disregard by the
cops for the life of a homeless guy who wasn’t threatening anyone, or if was
just sort of a gripping form of nostalgia, in the same way that watching Breaking Bad was a viewing experience
that was enhanced by my knowledge of all the landmarks around town.

The event still doesn’t make any sense to me. Here’s what I saw.

James Boyd, dressed in this gray sweatshirt thing, was just
talking to police about not wanting to hurt anybody. In the video he did not
appear to be carrying any sort of weapon, but the Albuquerque police officers
present were sure treating him like he had a gun in his hand pointed at them.
Then, as Boyd gathers up his stuff to come down to the police officers, instead
of arresting him for whatever it was that they were going to arrest him for,
someone says “do it!” and an explosion happens. Officers with weird yellow
shotguns start approaching him ordering Boyd to “get on the ground! Now!” And
then, as Boyd turns to get on the ground, gunshots ring out from somewhere and
then from the gun held by the guy wearing the helmet camera. Then,
nonsensically, they order Boyd to get his hands out after he’s been shot and is
in need of medical care. Boyd’s body twitches as it lies among the cactuses and
yucca plants of the New Mexican high desert, and the officers are concerned
about some knife clutched between the fingers of this homeless guy’s comatose
body. So they shoot him with a couple of beanbag shotgun rounds in the butt as
he is ordered to “drop the knife!” Does
Boyd comply? Does he choose not to comply? The knife is attached to the body,
and the body is most certainly on the ground at this point. This technicality
is ignored by the K9 officer, who allows his leaping German Shepherd-type dog
to grab and pull at Boyd’s midsection for a while before the rest of the posse
of officers approaches Boyd cautiously, deciding that Boyd probably isn’t going
to suddenly get up and charge at them with that knife.

What the fuck is this bullshit? is what I thought. That guy
wasn’t even a threat to officers, yet the officers shot him and then tortured
him by firing three beanbag rounds at his butt and attacking him with their
dog.

This is how law enforcement officers protect and serve?

“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”

But what was even weirder about this incident was what
followed. Lots of people really cared.

There were protest marches through downtown Albuquerque!
People carrying signs protesting police brutality right in my hometown, with
slogans about killer cops and acrostics making the point that APD could also
stand for “Another Person Dead”.[4]
And the protests didn’t stop. Days
after the first protest, people with Guy Fawkes masks from the group Anonymous made
some homemade signs and marched out on Central by the university. Officers in
riot gear and armored trucks confronted protestors by displaying assault rifles
and using tear gas to quell the more violent protestors as the night progressed.[5] This was some insane big city shit right in
the heart of the Duke City.

And this wasn’t just a small troupe of angry Burqueños
protesting over some local hobo in the foothills. I read think pieces about the
James Boyd incident in the New York Times and the Guardian. The Department of
Justice released its report on APD’s pattern and practice of use of excessive
force not long after the March protests.[6] For a brief time, the whole nation focused on
the Albuquerque Police Department.

But James Boyd’s was only the first of many police killings
to gain widespread coverage.

Of course the most famous police shooting incident in 2014
happened at the end of summer in the small St. Louis suburb of Ferguson,
Missouri. The killing of Michael Brown
sparked huge protests sustained for many weeks, and the corruption and
incompetence of the Ferguson Police Department was in the spotlight for the
nation to see.

The Michael Brown incident, happening just days after John
Crawford III was shot and killed in a Beavercreek, Ohio Walmart, felt like the
straw that broke the camel’s back. Michael Brown’s death at the hands of white
police officer Darren Wilson was not all that unusual or egregious by the
standards we have become so used to. But the mostly white police force’s harsh
reaction to the mostly black protests that followed the incident exposed the
deep distrust that exists between law enforcement and communities of color, as
Barack Obama put it in a speech delivered after a grand jury declined to indict
Officer Wilson.[7]

“Is it getting better? Is it getting worse?”

2014 seemed like the year of the officer involved shooting.
This was the year that Michael Brown got gunned down after stealing some
cigars. This was the year Eric Garner of Staten Island gasped for breath after
being put in a chokehold by an officer investigating the crime of selling
untaxed cigarettes. This was the year 12-year-old Tamir Rice of Cleveland got
shot and killed for playing with a toy gun in a park. This was the year John
Crawford III of Beavercreek, Ohio got stalked and killed by a police officer
after taking a Crosman MK-177 air rifle off the shelf and continuing shopping
(the rifle is still available on Walmart’s website[8]).
2014 was the year “hands up, don’t shoot!” became a protest slogan, when NBA
stars like LeBron James wore a shirt emblazoned with Eric Garner’s tragically
famous last words, “I can’t breathe!”
2014 was the year some of us had to be reminded that Black Lives Matter.

But while it seemed like police were killing more people now
than in years past, no one can say for certain.

The FBI numbers that FBI director James Comey called out for
being incomplete pointed towards a trend of increasing numbers of justifiable
police-committed homicides. The FBI’s data for 2013 was released in November of
2014 as part of the annual Uniform Crime Report and showed that 461 people had
been killed by police in 2013, representing the highest number in two decades
and the third consecutive increase in the annual toll.[9] But experts interviewed by the USA Today’s
Kevin Johnson were quick to indicate that the increase could simply be
explained by more police departments choosing to report to the FBI rather than
because police officers killing more people.
University of Nebraska criminologist Samuel Walker said it was
“irresponsible that we don’t have a complete set of numbers,” and University of
South Carolina criminologist Geoff Alpert called the voluntary reporting
structure “an embarrassment.”[10]

There is another official government source of police
homicides besides the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) keeps a
tally of arrest related deaths. This is due to the Death in Custody Reporting
Act of 2000, which was amended in 2003 to include arrest related deaths.

But
the BJS data suffers from the same FBI problem of underreporting by law enforcement
agencies. In the latest year for which data was collected, 2009, the BJS found 497 people had been killed by police.[11] Of the 17,985 law enforcement agencies in
existence in the United States, only 417 reported an arrest related death in
2009, which includes not only police homicides but also suicides and accidental
deaths.[12]

The Act was allowed to expire in 2006, but
Congress passed a renewed Death in Custody Reporting Act, sponsored by Senator
Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, in 2014. Despite the lousy rate of reporting
by law enforcement agencies in the past, Blumenthal was upbeat about it when
the bill passed Congress. “Hopefully there will be better compliance and
enforcement than existed then, and also more cooperation,” Blumenthal said.[13] Hopefully.

There is another law that would seem to mandate tallies of
police homicides. In 1994 congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act which included a mandate that the Department of Justice gather
data and publish an annual report about the use of excessive force by law
enforcement officers. 21 years later, we are still awaiting the first such
annual report on excessive force.[14]

The fact is, though it seems like there are more officer
involved shootings than before, we can’t really tell. Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of UCLA’s
Center for Policing Equity, put it this way in an interview with the Associated
Press’s Allen G. Breed.

"Is
it getting better? Is it getting worse? What are the actual numbers?" asks
Goff. "You know, when a plane crashes, it feels all of a sudden like it's
not safe to fly. But if you look at the statistics, it's way safer to fly — and
always has been — than to drive a car."[15]

“No one is keeping track of how many American citizens are
shot by their police. This is crazy,” lamented Kyle Wagner of Deadspin.[16]

Well, not no one.

“An impossibly ambitious project”

There have been a few attempts to develop a crowdsourced
database compiling every death at the hands of police. One is the US Police
Shootings Data started by Deadspin. The Deadspin database instructed readers to
Google each date and look for any incidence of a police officer discharging a
weapon and striking someone, whether or not the person lived or died. Then the user inputs the data about race,
age, gender, whether or not the person was armed, and what kind of weapon the decedent
had if any, into the database using a Google form. The database was introduced by Kyle Wagner
shortly after news about the death of Michael Brown became known, and was
originally intended to investigate every day from 2011 through 2014. He described it as “an impossibly ambitious
project”.[17] This has proven to be a pretty accurate
statement: while user participation was initially very high, only one entry to
the database has been attempted since January 29, 2015 (I wrote this on March 6,
2015). Still, the effort seems to have collected data from 60% of the dates
listed between 2011 and 2014.

Another crowdsourced effort was started by D. Brian Burghart
of the Reno News & Review. First conceived in 2012, the Fatal Encounters
database is intended to document every death through police interaction dating
back to 2000. It is more comprehensive
so far than the Deadspin database. Fatal Encounters found over 800 fatal
encounters with police in 2014, and it contains some impressively specific
features, like an attempt at documenting the exact address of each incident,
manner of death of the decedent, whether or not the decedent had symptoms of
mental illness, and what the final verdict by the district attorney was for
each incident.[18]

But so far the longest list of people killed by
police is run by the aptly-named Killedbypolice.net. Killedbypolice.net (I’m going to abbreviate
this KBP throughout this project) is run by an anonymous website administrator who also runs a site
called Pig State News about reports of police brutality and excessive force.
But while the perspective of the site administrator may be from an anti-cop
viewpoint, the list of names comes directly from reputable local television
stations and newspapers.

KBP started on May 1, 2013 and has kept a running tally of
individuals killed by police that it finds by scraping information from
seemingly every media outlet in the United States. This is its mission
statement:

Corporate news reports of people
killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or
not, and regardless of reason or method.Inclusion implies neither wrongdoing
nor justification on the part of the person killed or the officer involved. The
post merely documents the occurrence of a death.[19]

The website is simply an html table with an individual’s
name, age, gender, race (if known), the state the incident occurred in, the
date that the incident was first noticed by KBP, and a link to a news site
describing the officer involved shooting. In January 2015, the site tallied its
2000th record of a death caused by a police officer in the United
States since May 1, 2013.

Because it is the most comprehensive list out there, KBP has
started to become a source for news articles referring to the number of people
killed by police each year. KQED in San
Francisco analyzed the locations of all California arrest-related deaths using
data from Killedbypolice.net.[20]
The site is often used as a source for Huffington Post articles.[21] Lefty blogs and libertarian magazines
discovered the site in 2014.[22][23]

KBP’s list includes not only people who die from on-duty
police shootings, but also people who die after being tased, beaten, or
restrained. The list includes officers who kill people while driving in their
cars (both police vehicles and private vehicles), off-duty cops who commit
murders, and suspicious deaths in prisons.

I would argue that maybe not all of these deaths deserve to count against
America’s police forces.

FiveThirtyEight looked into this data to estimate the true
number of “the sort of police killings the government might be expected to keep
track of.”[24]
Reuben Fischer-Baum and Al Johri took a random sample of 146 incidents listed
on the killedbypolice.net website (at the time this accounted for 10% of the
incidents listed) and investigated each link to determine whether or not the
incident should count. They found that 85% of the incidents were clear-cut
police shootings occurring when a police officer shot someone in the line of
duty. 8% were found to be taser or restraint related deaths (which should maybe
count), and 7% were incidents that occurred outside the line of duty, or accidental
deaths (which shouldn’t count).

Using these percentages, Fischer-Baum and Johri estimated
that 1,250 to 1,350 deaths of the type that should count in a government
database had occurred between May 1, 2013 and August of 2014. This resulted in a rate of about 1,000 lethal
acts of force per year.

I got questions, man

Just like so many others, I wanted to know the answer to
this question too, about how many people died in 2014 due to a police officer’s
lethal act of force. But I also had
other questions. How many of these people were black? How many were white? How
many were Hispanic or Latino? How many were armed? How many were armed with
guns, or knives, or some other weapon, or nothing at all? Where did these
lethal acts happen? When did they happen? Why did they happen? Was the police
officer justified in taking another individual’s life?

I’m afraid I couldn’t find answers to these questions with
the data that was out there.

So I decided to create my own database.

I checked into each
and every link provided by Killedbypolice.net and googled as much information
as I could to analyze each of the incidents listed in 2014. I started looking into these questions in
December of 2014, and I stayed up late at night to research these events, using
as much of my free time as possible to satisfy my own curiosity. It took me
three months to compile this data, and a couple more weeks after that to find
the right words to talk about it. But I have finally come up with answers that
are both disturbing and enlightening.